Life-Term
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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You are Jake Stalin and you have been wrongly found guilty of murder. With no death penalty you have been placed on a planet called Souzel and you are in charge of processing rubbish into raw materials from a dozen surrounding planets. This is to be your new home till your death. Can you escape this planet or will you spend the rest of your days recycling other peoples waste?

Life-Term is a graphic text adventure where you can see a picture of your surroundings as you read text describing what you see. You type in commands to solve puzzles and complete tasks.

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Review : 

How about a little dystopian escape adventure? Life-Term says, "Here you are, and you're welcome!" 

Your character in this single-load text/graphics yarn, Jake Stalin (yes, really) is the sole, permanent resident of waste disposal processing planetoid Souzel. Jake was wrongly convicted of murder and here will spend the rest of his days supervising the urine filtration machines and whatnot--unless you can arrange a jailbreak. Although innocent of murder, Jake is apparently guilty of slovenliness, as the first screen tells you that his/your sleeping quarters are "unkempt." I suppose, under the circumstances of false solitary life imprisonment, a little untidiness is understandable. Your personal space has drugs, booze, and girlie magazines, so apparently Jake has been arranging for some creature comforts to be smuggled in to the waste processing plant. 

Your first order of business is to figure out how to arrange an escape. By glancing around it seems you will have no visitors for two more years, so you have to take more drastic action. From there you will need to experiment with explosives and disguises, as well as exploit the robots and machinery in your complex, in order to escape Souzel. 

Life-Term only infrequently discloses all of your exits, which is excusable in games with really revealing graphics. But as Life-Term is not one of these games, you just end up feeling confused and banging around randomly. Further complicating matters is the stylistic choice to have an entryway east not necessarily map to an exit west in places where it isn't really called for (like navigating inside buildings.) 

The game was reportedly built with Graphic Adventure Creator and although the parser is better than simple two-word commands, Infocom players will be quickly frustrated by a lack of support for simple niceties like "get all." The author didn't do players any favor with detail, either. If we can pick up clothes off our bedroom floor, perhaps we should then be able to wear them. The game chides us for wasting time. 

There are actually some neat ideas in Life-Term, but the "sci-fi escape adventure" was done much better in titles such as Oo-Topos. 


http://www.lemon64.com
